How cable stopped worrying and learned to love CableCARD

After railing against CableCARD's high price and "1996-era technology," the …

How times change. Was it only February 2007 that the cable industry's trade group was telling everyone who would listen that having to stick CableCARDs in their own set-top boxes was a "$600 million per year tax" on the industry; that the rule was "overkill"; that it was "backward looking and stifles innovation"; that it was a "solution in search of a problem"?

Yes, it was.

At issue was cable's claim that the FCC "integration ban" would add $72-$90 to the price of every single cable box. The claimed solution was basically to ditch CableCARD altogether; the decryption capability built into the cards would instead be offered as a small software module. Each cable operator could deploy whatever security it wanted, and the code would simply download into the set-top box or television or TiVo and run securely there.

Best of all, downloadable security would be cheap! And it was almost available! Just give us until 2009!

As a substitute for CableCARDs, the cable industry has been working on innovative downloadable security technology, which it hopes will be available by 2009. Both the FCC and the consumer electronics industry agree that downloadable security is a less costly, more efficient and more consumer-friendly solution than CableCARDs for both cable's leased set-top boxes and "digital cable ready" equipment sold at retail. By contrast, the FCC rule mandates the freezing-in of 1996-era technology.

But a funny thing happened on the way to 2009: the cable industry decided that 1996 wasn't such a bad year for tech, after all. In rolling out its tru2way initiative, cable added a significant middleware platform (which used to be called OCAP) but kept the CableCARD as its security component.

Turns out, a CableCARD slot doesn't actually cost that much to stick in a new device. In fact, it's a lot cheaper than getting the downloadable conditional access system (DCAS) up and running. This quote from a recent Multichannel News piece caught my eye because of the huge shift it represents in cable thinking.

According to Time Warner Cable's Kevin Leddy, “The economics of downloadable security are challenging. At this point, the cost to a television set for a CableCard slot is a couple of bucks. To put the more complex technology into the television to do downloadable security will probably add more cost.”

Wow—down from "$72-$90" to "a couple of bucks" in 23 months? That's a bit like a $1,500 laptop dropping to $41 over the same time span. Either this is some sort of technical miracle or maybe—just maybe—the cable industry got a bit hyperbolic with its integration ban talking points. Or perhaps DCAS just didn't pan out. In any case, "Long live CableCARD!" appears to be the new cable industry rallying cry.